Seismic Suppression: Chinese Censorship After the SichuanEarthquake

Those who thought that the devastating Sichuan earthquake of May
12 brought out the best in the Chinese government should think
again.

Six weeks after the quake, it has become obvious that the local
government's incompetence and venality was responsible for the
collapse of schools while other buildings stood. But now that
foreign reporters are covering the deaths of school children and
the subsequent angry protests of their parents, Beijing's Central
Propaganda Department has reverted to its dictum that the only news
fit to print is pro-regime news.[1]

In order to suppress unfavorable news coverage, the Chinese
government has adopted a two-pronged approach. First, Beijing has
attacked the source of dissent, threatening any grieving parents
who persisted in their protests. Second, the government has
embarked on an extensive campaign of media censorship. For
instance, foreign reporters covering the parents' demonstrations in
Sichuan were detained and deported from the towns where the
protests took place. The Los Angeles Times notes that "web
discussion groups have seen postings deleted" magically, as if by
some unseen Web umpire.[2] And The Washington Post notes that
at least one web journalist, Huang Qi, along with two associates,
was arrested for posting revealing commentary on the aftermath of
the disaster.[3]

Additionally, a scholar who wrote about shoddy construction at
schools, Zeng Hongling, was charged with, well, who knows what? Ms.
Zeng's "crime," said the Asian Wall Street Journal, was "to
pen a series of firsthand accounts on the earthquake in Mianyang
and send them to a friend, who posted them on the Internet. It's
unclear how the police found her, since the essays were posted
under a pseudonym."[4]

The Real Story

Now that the dust has settled and further crisis has apparently
been averted, the real story of China's horrific earthquake
shouldn't be how the government managed the crisis but rather:

How, despite Chinese Communist spin to the contrary, this
tragedy was in fact a "manmade" disaster, and

How many Chinese citizens died because Communist Party and
government bureaucrats failed to enforce construction codes in
Sichuan Province--known throughout history for its apocalyptic
geological upheavals.[5]

Warning Signs

On July 27, 1976, the "Tangshan Quake" struck the
Tangshan-Tianjin-Beijing megapolis, whose urban centers were
characterized by poorly constructed, unreinforced concrete-slab
buildings with free-standing brick walls. Approximately 240,000
people (the exact toll has never been revealed) died in the
Tangshan Quake; thousands of the dead were coal miners trapped in
poorly reinforced underground shafts. Given the role substandard
construction played in amplifying the Tangshan death toll,
Communist Party leaders had clear warning that, in the event of
another earthquake, current provincial building designs could
result in mass death.

It has been 32 years since the Tangshan temblor, with no
intervening Atlantis-scale quakes to remind the Chinese Communist
Party why construction codes are useful. Subsequently, the
engineering and construction bureaucracy in Sichuan may have--in
return for a cash consideration--taken to winking and looking the
other way as poorly constructed buildings filled the province.[6] As a
result, the current death toll from the Sichuan earthquake
continues to climb.

The Coming Wave

In the hours and days after the quake, foreign journalists moved
with little restriction throughout Sichuan's provincial capital in
Chengdu--only 55 miles from the quake's epicenter--and were allowed
into the demolished towns and villages closer to ground zero. These
journalists filed the earliest reports documenting the bitterness
and anger among the Chinese people. One citizen declared: "This is
not a natural disaster--this is done by humans."[7]

Although much of the Chinese people's initial anger may have
been defused by a combination of government relief efforts, Premier
Wen Jiabao's physical presence at the site of the quake and a
crackdown on protests, there are indications that the Communist
Party should be ready for a new wave of accusations and
recriminations from the survivors and relatives of the more than
80,000 dead.

There are varying opinions among the relatives of the dead as
who is to blame for the current loss of life. Some blame the local
governments and claim that the central government was not correctly
informed about the situation. These critics also argue that local
government leaders are the ones suppressing the media in order to
insulate themselves from criticism. In one grieving mother's words,
"We blame the local government for this; the central government
doesn't know because local media haven't reported what happened."[8]

A century ago, such tactics were known as the "Czar's defense,"
which protested that "if the Czar only knew what was happening, he
wouldn't permit it." Yet, the Central Propaganda Department knows
that this defense can only accomplish so much. Even the normally
reserved Chinese journalists eventually became critical, taking
note of destroyed schools next to intact buildings. These domestic
reporters soon leveled accusations against the local government,
leading the propaganda ministry to ban reports on school
construction as well as protests by parents.[9]

With the Olympics set to begin in Beijing in August, the Chinese
government appears to have retained its standard operating
procedure of suppressing negative media coverage of manmade
disasters. Despite promises to allow free press coverage of the
Olympics, based on the government's reaction to the Sichuan quake,
any immediate loosening of media restrictions seems unlikely. Any
criticism--foreign or domestic--will not be tolerated by the
Chinese government, even as the world gathers in its capital.

Chinese Double-Speak

Sometimes, one wonders if senior Chinese leaders really believe
the words they utter. On February 28, for example, Foreign Minister
Yang Jiechi insisted that, "No one will get arrested because he
said that human rights are more important than the Olympics. This
is impossible. Ask 10 people from the street to face public
security officers and ask them to say "human rights are more
important than the Olympics' 10 times or even 100 times, and I will
see which security officer would put him in jail."[10]

Yang's statement came a week after Chinese state prosecutors
tried Yang Chunlin, an unemployed factory worker, on charges of
"inciting subversion of state power" after he said human rights
were more important than the Olympic Games.[11] And it was two
weeks before a law professor at Beijing's China University of
Political Science, Teng Biao, was warned by four security police,
in the words of the Wall Street Journal, to 'stop writing
articles critical of China's human-rights record, particularly with
regard to the Olympic Games in Beijing this August. If he
continues, they said, he would lose his position at the China
University of Political Science and face jail."[12] And just this
week, the Reuters news agency reports that Chinese authorities in
Kalpin, Xinjiang, have demolished a mosque "for refusing to put up
signs supporting this August's Beijing Olympics."[13]

We will know that China is really "opening up," really
modernizing, really liberalizing, when the Chinese media get to
report on the Communist Party's continued denial of human rights
and suppression of dissent.

John J. Tkacik, Jr., is
Senior Research Fellow in China, Taiwan, and Mongolia Policy in the
Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

Heritage Intern James Callahan assisted in the research and
writing of this WebMemo.

[5]
There were ten quakes registering 7.0 or above on the Richter scale
in western China between 1917 and 1950, five of them within 500
miles of the May 12 quake in the decade between 1917 and 1927. The
last quake of this scale in Sichuan was in the 1930s. For a
complete list, see U.S. Geological Survey compilation "Earthquakes
with 1,000 or More Deaths since 1900" at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/world/world_deaths.php (June
25, 2008).

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